Today is my first day working full-time on my startup, Badgy, and I’m excited to fully apply the lessons learned from building social games to the digital marketing world.

Badgy started about a year ago when I tried a simple experiment – I gave digital badges on Twitter to 100 people who mentioned the word “Badge”, and asked them to retweet me for another badge. I ran this experiment many times over a weekend, and when 20-25% of people did retweet me each time, I knew I had something, but I didn’t know what it was yet. In more recent months, as Badgy’s market became more clear, a few really talented Atlanta entrepreneurs joined the Badgy team to help build and sell our products.

We’ve discovered that Badgy is tremendously effective at helping consumer brands and the marketing agencies that often manage their social presence grow their audience of engaged users. We worked with a major toilet paper brand and boosted their Twitter followers by 700% over 10 weeks, while also improving the quality of interaction from their fans. More recently, we’ve added features that bring similar power to Facebook using the most effective tools popularized by social games like Zynga’s Farmville and Cityville, and are signing on 2 more customers. If you’re serious about building up the digital marketing program of a product people love, drop me an email at rob at bad dot gy and we’ll put together a plan for how Badgy can amplify your digital marketing efforts.

For me and a several other sharp people, our time making social games at Menue Americas wrapped up a bit sooner than expected. If you need an excellent creative director or 2D artists, let me know and I’ll get you connected. Some very good developers are now available. They’re taking their time finding their next great career move, but if you have some project work that needs to get done properly, especially Facebook development, PHP, Java, or Ruby on Rails web apps, drop me an email and I’ll pass it along if it’s a fit.

Does this mean I’m not going to “Join a Startup“? I’ve done that several times before, and will almost certainly do so again when a good opportunity arrives and makes sense, but that’s not something to rush into. Right now, I’ve got a great startup that has shipped product, shown traction, and generated revenue. That’s 3 steps further than many companies ever get. We’re in a great market – digital marketing has room to grow at least another $50 billion per year in spending. Here’s to the ride.